bengarves.com/work/deindex-homepage-cannibals
De-Index Homepage Cannibals
[SEO-35] Deindex Homepage Cannibals
From Ben Garves’s work at Udemy. Re-created from the original document, with people’s names, internal links and non-public numbers removed or generalized.
StorySEO-35
- Company
- Udemy
- Created
- Resolved
- Status
- Done
- Priority
- P1 - High
- Story points
- 3
- Epic
- LOHP Technical SEO Updates (SEO-21)
- Project
- SEO Squad
- Sprints
- SEO Sprint 1, SEO Sprint 2, SEO Sprint 3
- Linked issue
- SEO-30, “Update/remove stale rules from robots…” (Done), depends on this story
- Requirement source
- Engineering
A story to stop Udemy’s sign-in and logout URLs from ranking for homepage keywords: first point their canonical at the homepage, give Google two days to see the change, then mark them noindex.
- Technical SEO
- Indexing
- Canonicalization
- Keyword cannibalization
User story
As a search engine, I’d like Udemy to remove URLs that are competing with its home page so that I can send users to the correct destination.
Background
Udemy has a number of URLs that rank for homepage-related keywords, including our login and logout pages. This ticket is designed to undergo a process that will defer their canonical, wait for Google to see the change, then mark them as noindex.
Acceptance criteria
- For the list of pages below, set the canonical to be the homepage (https://www.udemy.com/)
- Wait 2 days for Google to see the change
- For the list below, set the pages as “noindex”
Page list
- https://www.udemy.com/join/passwordless-auth/
- https://www.udemy.com/logout/
- https://www.udemy.com/organization/global-login/
[BG 4/30] - Adding https://www.udemy.com/organization/global-login/email, as it looks like the /global-login/ page redirects to it. My bad!
Glossary
Canonical: the URL a page tells search engines to treat as the primary version. noindex: a robots directive asking search engines to drop a page from their index.